Renaming Multiple files in one command

[Amit Dixit_2]

Hi,
I have more that 500 file with naming convention
myfile.txt.20050117042157484.arc
and I want to rename them to
myfile.txt.20050117042157484

Want to remove ".arc" extension from all of them.

will this command do
ls -1 *.arc | awk '{print "mv "$1.arc" "$1" "}'

Thanks,
Amit.

[Paul_481]

Hi Amit,

Run this script on the directory of the file.

for i in `ll|grep txt|awk '{print $9}'`
do
nfile=${i%.arc}
mv $i $nfile
done

I checked it, it work. Modify to suit your needs.

Regards,
Paul

[Hein van den Heuvel]

You are not the first one to ask this question.
For example look for rename in a Unix faq:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/faq/part2/index.html


The following examples, tailored to your problem work for me:

piping ls selection into perl:

$ ls my*arc | perl -ne 'chop; $old=$_; s/\.arc//; rename $old,$_'

or just perl glob function:

perl -e 'while (){$old=$_; s/\.arc//;rename $old,$_}'


btw... Paul's example can be simplified a lot replacing:
`ll|grep txt|awk '{print $9}'`
with:
`ls *txt*`


Regards,
Hein.

[Venkatesan_5]

hi amit,

try this ...
goto the directory where you want to change ....execute this ....

for i in *.arc
do
nfile=${i%.arc}
mv $i $nfile
done

I have checked and it works...


regds
Venkatesan.

[Muthukumar_5]

You can do it as,


for file in `ls *.arc`
do

mv $file $(echo $file | cut -d"." -f1-3)

done

hth.

[Muthukumar_5]

You can use your method also as,

ls -1 *.arc | awk '{ split($1,a,"."); print "mv "$1" "a[1]"."a[2]"."a[3] }' | sh

| sh is used to make action.

It will do it.

[C. Beerse_1 · Accepted solution]

I already see some replies, none of which uses the `basename` command, which has an option to remove the extention.

for f in *.arc
do
mv $f `basename $f .arc`
done

Or with find, to traverse a filesystem (this is a one-liner)

find . -name '*.arc' -exec 'mv {} `dirname {}`/`basename {} .arc` ;'

[Sandman!]

amit,

the following command will do what you're looking for...


# ls -1 *.arc | awk -F".arc" '{system("mv "$0" "$1)}'

[Aupee Jean-Francois]

amit,

try this ,

ls -1 *arc |sed 's/\(.*\)\(\.arc\)/mv \1\2 \1'|sh -v

regards

[Vibhor Kumar Agarwal]

Why to complicate sed

sed -e 's/\.arc$//g'

[Vibhor Kumar Agarwal]

Lets generalise it a bit:

The following will work for any extension

sed -e 's/\..*$//g'